Ninth grade students in Stephanie Hurt’s English class at Brodhead High School have participated in the National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community-Ready Writer’s Program (C3WP) all year. Students learned to consider multiple perspectives around an issue and to write evidence-based arguments asking for change. For their final argument, students chose an issue they care about, researched the conversation surrounding the issue, and wrote an evidence-based letter to a real audience, such as these letters to the editor. 

From Payton Demrow

Brodhead High School

To the editor:

High school gets really stressful on teens, so sometimes when they go home they like to relax. But, some teenagers like to relax by using something that is probably illegal for their age, and that is vaping or juuling. It’s very bad for a teens health to be juuling/vaping at such a young age. But the real problem here is that the teens are doing it in their schools. Most teens like to do it in the bathroom or locker room because teachers won’t see them.

According to researchers ​one Juul “pod,” of nicotine cartridge inserted into the smoking device and heated, delivers about 200 puffs, about as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes, according to the product website. So when teenagers don’t know about this information then they will probably keep continuing to wreck their bodies. “Assuming a teen smokes one pod a week, “in five weeks, that’s like 100 cigarettes,” Ling said. “By that point, you’re considered an established smoker.” (Kaiser health news). So, that means that mostly all teens that have been using vape or Juul for 2 months are considered established smokers, which is a huge deal.

“It found that 63 percent of young JUUL users did not know that the product always contains the addictive chemical nicotine…” (truth initiative) This is a big problem for teens all around the world. Because some teens even Juul cause they think it’s “healthier” than smoking a cigarette, cause they think it doesn’t have nicotine in it.

Due to all of the stress that comes with high school some students like to relax in a way that is illegal. I think schools can help teens with this whole vaping/juuling issue by giving teens more information about what they are putting into their bodies. Also, I think if teachers know more about the situation as well then they can maybe help some students who want to stop. Or if they see it, they won’t mistake it as a flash drive or something else.